Sometimes a little time away from home can make you more aware of changes in your everyday environment. For us, those changes are usually a good thing. For our friends in the animal kingdom, not so much. I realized this after I returned from a trip to the Everglades.

I love the Everglades. Native Americans called it the River of Grass, and so it remains today. It is a vast, slow-moving, 100-mile wide river flowing south from Lake Okeechobee toward the Gulf of Mexico that encompasses more than 1.5 million acres. It is home to a wonderfully diverse collection of wildlife, including 51 species of mosquitoes.

The Everglades and its inhabitants have been threatened by ill-conceived water policies, agricultural expansion and encroaching development. But a concerted effort from a broad spectrum of interested parties is slowly reversing the damage; restoring the ecosystems in the Everglades and bringing the American alligator and other species back from the brink of extinction.

Things seem much more benign here in Ventura County. Sure, there's been development and, undoubtedly, we've affected some of the creatures that were here long before we built our first housing tract, but it wasn't until I contrasted what had happened in the Everglades with our county that I began to truly realize what we're doing to our wildlife.

We may not have driven any of our local species into extinction, but we've certainly changed them. Animals are coming into residential areas in many places around the county as they search for easy food. A bear was recently chased from a Meiners Oaks neighborhood, and coyote, raccoon and opossum sightings are commonplace. But what I witnessed recently wasn't about food; it was almost evolutionary.

Perhaps that's overstating it a bit, but still, it was weird. I walked out to my driveway, just before dawn, and there was a mockingbird in the tree across the street, singing song after song, with no end to the performance in sight. I stopped for just a moment to listen, as I often do, but what came next shocked me.

In the midst of his repertoire, the mockingbird sang a perfect imitation of a car alarm. At first, I couldn't believe what I had just heard, but he sang it twice more. What have we done to our feathered friends that would make them adopt our most obnoxious sounds?

In "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee wrote, "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

It may be a greater sin to teach them the sounds of a car alarm. It makes me wonder if future generations, our children's children, will be listening to mockingbirds serenading them with ringtones.

I have no solutions for this, of course. Lovelier ringtones, perhaps. Or a ban on car alarms. Maybe the best thing we could do would be to simply recognize that the way we live our lives affects the lives of those around us — our children, our community and even the wildlife.

We can't stop progress, but we can watch where we step, and we need to step carefully.

I really hope the mockingbird across the street was the exception, and not the rule, because I fear that once we start down that road, there's no turning back. People working together are saving the Everglades; our task is smaller, but no less important.

— Contact Star columnist Bill Nash at bnash805@aol.com.